Notice that partitioning changes the way the table is physically ordered on disk.

A statement like

SELECT * FROM t2 WHERE WhereCol=’A’;

would have to load only the red part of the table into memory. This may show benefits on a one-node cluster as well as on multi-node clusters. On a multi-node cluster, a large table like t2 is distributed across the active nodes. It can additionally be partitioned also. Should the two tables reside on a three-node cluster with distribution on the JoinCol columns and the table t2 partitioned on the WhereCol column, they look like this: